Quantum entanglement has been called “spooky action at a distance” by Einstein and has often been called spooky or weird since then. Recently two diamonds, big enough to see with your eye, were observed to have entangled quantum mechanical states.

The Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source produces x-rays a billion times brighter than the sun by flinging electrons around at nearly the speed of light. Find out how and the ways that scientists use these brilliant flashes of invisible light to probe the world of the unseen.

The sun produces HUGE amounts of energy. In just five seconds, the sun gives off an amount of energy equal to the electricity used by the entire world’s population in one year! How does the sun make all of this energy? It makes it through fusion. This Physics in Action explores fusion and how scientists at MIT are getting closer to producing this great source of energy.

Every popular explanation of particle physics is liberally illustrated with cartoon-like pictures of straight and wiggly lines representing electrons, photons, and quarks, interacting with one another. These so-called Feynman diagrams were introduced by Richard Feynman in the journal Physical Review in 1949, and they quickly became an essential tool for particle physicists.

Very large stars can end their lives in a cataclysmic explosion called a supernova. The photographs show a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way located only about 160,000 light years away.

The neutrino is a ghostly particle that leaves hardly a trace of its passing. Most neutrinos go right through Earth without any deviation or interaction, and trillions harmlessly pierce your body each second.

We know about solids, liquids, gases, and plasmas —these are the well-known states of matter. But now there’s another, called the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), and it’s been predicted for a long time.

Physicists measure the values of basic quantities like the speed of light and the charge of the electron. Cosmologists use the results in studies of the origin of the universe, some 12 billion years ago, and they assume the numbers have not changed over this time.

At RHIC--the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, located at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York--gold nuclei traveling at nearly the speed of light smash into each other, destroying themselves and producing a spray of other particles.

Joe McMaster, producer, director, and writer of Nova's The Elegant Universe, is not a physicist. Fortunately, he had the patient help of the show's star and narrator, physicist Brian Greene, as he put together the PBS production delving into String Theory.